Monday, January 10, 2011

I’m just under the wire -- on the West Coast, anyway -- in reminding readers that it was “50 years ago today, on January 10, 1961, that American detective-story writer Dashiell Hammett -- who’d invented enduring characters such as The Continental Op and Sam Spade, and in the course of it, changed the character of detective fiction itself -- perished of lung cancer at New York City’s Lenox Hill Hospital. He was only 66 years old, but had contracted tuberculosis during World War I and then damaged his health still further by persistently over-consuming alcohol and cigarettes.”